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Yesterday’s NLRB decision that college athletes can unionize is all about race. And it is only about race. It is another promotion of reparations and entitlements for those coming out of urban America–most of them minorities. If White college golf players filed this case, I guarantee you the NLRB would have come out against unionization of college athletes. This is just another form of 40 acres and a mule . . . plus interest. To be subsidized by YOU.

Kain Colter, the former Northestern University quarterback who led the effort to unionize, is Black, and Peter Sung Ohr, the regional director of the Chicago NLRB office, is a career government liberal and an Obama guy. The decision applies only to basketball and football players, and those are both–in excess of 75%–dominated by Black athletes, who’ve long insisted they should be paid beyond the payment they already get: undeserved admission and four-year tuition to colleges for which they aren’t prepared, meals, gifts from boosters, and money for incidentals and tickets for their families.

The NLRB and the media are hyping the decision as appropriate for college football and basketball programs because they allegedly “make money” and “make billions” for colleges and universities. But that’s just not true. In fact, most college football and basketball programs operate in the red. Few make money except the ones at the very top, such as at my alma mater, The University of Michigan. And the NLRB decision doesn’t apply to public universities like Michigan. Northwestern University is a private school. For the most part, the football and basketball programs that make money are at public schools, with few exceptions (like Duke). (I predict, though, that eventually this decision will take hold and be applied to public university athletes, too.)

The decision was of special interest to me because I’ve written repeatedly over the last two decades or more that colleges and universities should get out of the pro sports development league biz. If you are struggling to pay tuition bills for yourself or your children, do you really think you should also be financing the developmental leagues for future millionaires to perform test patterns for current billionaire owners of NFL and NBA teams? Well, that’s exactly what you are doing. You are paying for the beta testing of wannabe pro athletes, most of whom are not that good and only a small scintilla of a fraction of which will every really play in the NFL or NBA.

That’s why it’s so ridiculous that these guys think they are so valuable that they should be allowed to unionize. In fact, most of these guys will end up making less money in life than a welder or a truck driver. And, yes, many welders and truck drivers are unionized, but welders-in-training and truck-drivers-in-training are not unionized, especially the ones who never make it to the job.

I’ve also noted over the years that, as a tutor for the University of Wisconsin Athletic Department when I went to Law and then Business School, the athletes are–for the most part–not real students and have no business in college. I can’t tell you how many Wisconsin Football players I basically had to rewrite papers for from scratch because these guys–most of whom emanate from the killing fields of America and just don’t have basic reading, writing, or comprehension skills–couldn’t string a complete sentence together. I also tutored hockey players–mostly White–and they were no Einsteins, either. Not even close. We already know how stupid and ignorant the college students, who actually got admitted based on test scores and grades, are. So multiply the stupidity quotient geometrically, and you get these kids who are called “student”-athletes, but aren’t real students at all. (I wrote about all of this in an op-ed piece in the Wisconsin State Journal, once I knew I was leaving town. I was promptly fired by the Wisconsin Athletic Department, and my life and safety were threatened by football and basketball players in the same way that Muslims do that to me, today.)

And all this begs the question about other sports and those who compete in them at colleges and universities.

Do lesbian sports, er . . . “women’s sports” get to unionize at colleges? They are like tiny ants urinating on the sidewalk. Nobody cares about them and nobody watches them. The few college men’s basketball and football programs that make money subsidize these butch chick sports. And these women definitely aren’t “students.”

The absolute dumbest athletes I tutored were the female ones. As I’ve pointed out over the years, colleges and universities eager to pass muster on “gender parity” and other stupidities of Title IX court rulings and federal regulations, will take anyone with a vagina and a pulse to field and compete on their teams for crew and other fake “sports” nobody cares about. You gotta regatta lesbiatta! is kind of the motto for desperate athletic department coaches and recruiters. A woman can have an SAT score of 500 and a GPA of 1.9 and get a scholarship to a college where non-athlete students are rocket scientists in comparison to these idiotettes.

But, even though the Northwestern NLRB case applies only to men’s basketball and football, federal law is not gonna dictate that only male sports can unionize. So women whose sports programs draw no audience will be allowed to unionize and demand pay that they haven’t earned. In fact, their scholarships and free food and board are bleeding money from athletic departments all over the country. When a Ford or GM plant does that, they don’t negotiate a union contract. They close the plant and give everyone a layoff notice.

As I mentioned above, college athletes get about $2,000 each for incidentals, and the schools fly in their relatives for visits, as well as flying the players home for holidays and vacations. Do your kids get that spending money? Do they get free trips for you or them, so you can see each other during the school year? Hell, no! Yet, you’re subsidizing this welfare benefit for these athletes, plain and simple. It’s laughable that these athletes–more than 90% of whom, again, are not nor will ever be good enough for the pros–have compared themselves to “slaves” and called the college sports programs “plantations.” It’s a four-year paid vacation to attend an institution they don’t deserve to be in, in the first place, under the ruse of being students AND athletes, when they are only the latter.

And if these scholarship “student”-athletes get to unionize, what about kids at school on music scholarships? They have to practice many hours each day, just as college athletes do. Are they “slaves” of the colleges and universities, too? Shouldn’t they get to unionize? The ability to unionize isn’t predicated on whether or not the employer makes money on your work or the product or service you provide. Profitability is only a negotiating point for a collective bargaining agreement. It’s not a prerequisite to organize to negotiate the contract.

The bottom line is that the NLRB is all about liberal appeasement of race merchantry. Nothing more. And these colleges and universities are hypocrites. The NCAA–populated entirely by liberal college and university members and their uber-lefty academic presidents–should welcome this decision, as the schools teach Race Card 101 in virtually every curriculum in every department. They teach that this kind of thing–Black athletes being given the gift of a free four-year (or five, in some cases) party courtesy of you–is the least you can do. And that you should do more. But even liberals have venal self-interests and financial bottom lines . . . when it comes to their own purses and wallets, especially at a time when the college degree is more worthless than ever and being seen more and more as a bad investment. And that’s why they are appealing the decision.

But, if anyone is in indentured servitude here, it’s not the athletes who get four years of the good hedonistic life, partying, pampering, sex with multiple groupies, and all expenses paid.

It’s the taxpayers, students, and parents, who subsidize idiots blessed with an accident of birth in being unnaturally big, tall, fast, and strong. You are subsidizing the NFL’s and NBA’s minor leagues.

And if student-athletes get the right to unionize, it should be at the expense of those leagues. Not you.

Since the NRLB is saying these are employees rather than students, it’s time for colleges to get out of the sports industry, as it has nothing to do with higher education.

Don’t expect college president geeks to give that up, though. After lifetimes as eggheads who aren’t “cool,” they finally get to be like Mark Cuban and Jay-Z and the Wilson and Mara and Tisch families.

And they won’t walk away from that willingly.

Sadly, neither will the tax and tuition payers who make this idiocy all possible.

If you root for your alma mater on the gridiron or hardwood court, you are part of the problem. The problem that the NRLB just exacerbated.

Debbie, during the course of the article, you mentioned women’s college athletics, the reason why there sorta lacking the audience per se, is because of the sports media, they’re not showing too much coverage of them to get media exposure, to me, that looks like a misogynistic patriarch, of the males getting more favor over the females. Granted, I happen to watch women’s sports and they can play the game as the men can (I also know and aware that in basketball, the females don’t dunk, due to lack of height, it’s a fact and NOT me being a chauvinist misogynist).

But in generality, this source and story isn’t about men’s sports vs. women’s sports, it’s merely about NCAA Football and NCAA Men’s Basketball preferably being unionized, we also know those of us who follows NCAA Sports is that student athletics don’t get paid for playing collegiate sports, but play on a scholarship. I’ll give an example, the SMU Football program in the mid 1980s, that program experienced all sorts of corruption that allegedly it was reported at the time that I believe that the schools AD were paying the players to play the game, paid for their apartments, etc., and about a few years later, the program had the “death penalty” instituted upon them, and SMU Football was out of commission for two years (1987 and 1988)!

And this is really another unfortunate legacy of the 60s. As if the 60s weren’t already bad enough — giving us the Clintons, Obama, Kerry and the other student ‘protesters’ who worked with Conmmunists and similar left-wingers, and/or supported the Viet Cong, we should remember that the whole idea of students as workers who should be unionized was promoted by SDS at many schools.

And that, itself, was a legacy of the Communist student movement of the 30s.

The worst things to come out of the 60s by far were the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, and Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nearly every current problem in the US is related to one or more of those.

I’ve long been an advocate for College sports to become an ALL-Professional system. The college would lease out their stadiums, team name, logos etc. to a professional sports team that represents the school After that, it’s all pro. The athletes don’t even have to go to school.

If the pro team breaks the terms of the lease, they get dumped and another pro team takes over the lease.

If an athlete can get admitted to the school under normal competitive admissions criteria, the pro team may opt to pay tuition and fees for that player as an employment benefit. (A lot of corporations will pay tuition and fees for their employees taking night school and continuing education classes. Some of these are degree-track programs. This would be similar.)

Once college football and basketball are pro sports, we can end all this nonsense about race, scholarship, academics, recruiting violations etc. The kids can play sports, make money and go to school for as long as they want (or not at all if they so choose).

This seems to me like the best way to go. Make the NBA and the NFL pay for it. They have NO minor league system to pay for like baseball does. The NFL in particular is getting WAY TO fat and sassy right now–just like Mark Cuban said.

The NCAA would be smart to transition to a pay-for-play model, and the NFL would be smart to pay attention to any such change. The colleges and universities are in possession of the beginnings of professional teams, and professional teams are very valuable.

Suppose Alabama, Michigan, Texas, Ohio State, Florida State, USC and another 15 of the bigger college football programs decided to “go pro” and form a completely new professional league. Would that new league not have millions of fans ready to support a professional version of what had once been college ball? Ditto for men’s basketball.

The NFL and the NBA should be very worried about competition from converted college football programs.

If money is so tight, why have an athletic program of any kind?
Sure, have a gym if the kids want work out, but why are taxpayers subsidizing the NFL and NBA?
It’s stupid and a waste of money.
College is supposed to be about getting an education, not providing entertainment to the masses.

I honestly don’t understand how sports and education ever got so incest-ed.
It’s an unhealthy relationship and should just end now.
This latest unionization push should be the death knoll of college sports, hopefully.

I bet this sounds great to some athletes, until their tuition assistance, scholarships, perks, etc., begin to be taxed as income. Of course, the financial assistance these trainees for the pros will have to go up, so other students will pay for it. And what about the alumni? Do we think they will want to give so much more money to these “employees” or rather cancel their employment by canceling sports?

I lived in College Station TX 1977-1988 and worked at Texas A&M. They took in MILLIONS of $$$ every year from alumni for sports, yet tuition kept going up. Just think if there were no sports teams to spend money on. That $$$ would have to go to other things, like lowering tuition and pumping out more engineers and teachers and such! (Maybe raising staff pay? I made $4.25 and hour)

The union leaders will be having a GORBASM over the possibility of unionizing students. Eventually, every student, from grad school down to pre-K and from infancy can become UNION MEMBERS. The brainwashing could begin at birth — and the funds will flow to the unions and the DNC forever. Opposition could be crushed from birth! Mullah Barry would never have to leave the WH and allow Hillary to wear the diadem he has worked so hard to create for himself!!!

I cannot think of a better way to corrupt and eventually eliminate college sports all together. No benefit to education at all. And then what will the liberal media push? I say pay them and let the unions demonstrate what they really do. DESTROY

Debbie is incorrect on this one, as an avid sports fan, she couldn’t more wrong in her assumption, that this is about race.
The fact that most sports players are black, has nothing to do with it, and this process is going to be long and arduous.

The players who filed this suit, did it so if they get hurt playing for the school, their medical should be covered. Thats not too much to ask. You think its fair if a kid get hurt playing for the school and now he is bankrupt because of medical bills @ age 24? If you do, you are foolish in my option.

A report came out the University of Alabama football made 22 million this past year, and the more these things get reported the more its going to change the culture. You also have Obannon case from UCLA, suing, that if a college uses a players likeness, the player should get paid. Is that about race.

Yeah athletes are black, so, its the one thing blacks are exceptional at, dont make this ruling about race, because you are wrong. WRONG!

Have to ask before I get to my point? How many blacks hit on you Debbie when you were tutoring, asked for your phone number and all that? Black guys never hold back on asking girls out.

You are right about this is about race entitlements. In general, the black liberation crowd doesn’t value education. All blacks are not in the black liberation crowd. So this is not about race its about ideology. Black liberation activists haven’t seen blacks use education as a way to get out of poverty so they want more entitlements. Education in Asian, Jewish, White and most other ethnicities is valued. So when a full ride scholarship is offered then that is valued and they understand how priceless it is for their children. As for the black liberation crowd they haven’t seen any meaningful results from these scholarships so that isn’t enough.
So here we go, they will want trust funds and likeness contracts, stipends, shoe contracts, etc.
The colleges should go to the NFL and NBA that we will no longer be your farm system. That terms of agreements will be such that players are full time students and part time athletes. We will require athletes to meet the minimum standards of each university like all other students. So that will mean 96% of athletes wont qualify. Where will those athletes play in small towns where no one will watch or care, just like minor league baseball or minor league hockey. Those that care to put academics before sports can still go to college. guess what people will still watch the Rose Bowl and the final four and stadiums will still sell out.

If the players are employees, they’ll have to start paying income taxes on all their tuition, books, fees, housing, meals, air fare, tuckets, medical coverage aside from workers comp etc… What a cluster F— decision.